


Subterranean Lovesick Blues

by DeanRH



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 15x18 coda, Angst, Coda, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:42:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27524809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeanRH/pseuds/DeanRH
Summary: Dean remembers Castiel.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	Subterranean Lovesick Blues

Dean used to play a very stupid game sometimes.

He'd squeeze his eyes shut in bed and wish like hell to be back at four years old in his bedroom.

All of this had been a dream.

When he tried really, really hard, sometimes he could half make himself believe it.

That there was a whole other life out there for him.

That this endless trial of sadness and tears and crap had never come.

That he could have loved, how he should have loved.

He lay in the darkness of his bedroom in the bunker and stared into the darkness, willing it to be the soft evening light of a Lawrence, Kansas summer evening, back when he still had windows filled with the soft scent of clover on a slight breeze that lifted the lace curtains his mom had put on his bedroom.

That Dean - the Dean before everything - loved like Cas said he loved.

He hated it, almost -

the things Cas had said.

Because he recognized himself in them, but a version of him that was as distant as those alternate-universe ones had been. 

_This_ version of Dean was a monster. Just like Claire had once said.

He was a murderer.

A liar.

Everything he touched -

_corrupts._

The tears came easily to him then, as easy as they'd always been hard in the past, after he'd trained himself out of it, after he'd taught himself and been taught at the other end of John Winchester's fists that _real men don't cry._

And yet another lesson at John's fists -

_real men ain't queer. I ain't gonna have no fag for a son -_

after catching him once in a sweet kiss from some boy he'd met somewhere on the road.

After that, Dean kept it hidden.

Bottled up.

Until he hated himself, hated himself for going looking for it, at first telling himself it was for the money, it was for Sammy, it was to keep them fed.

But it was also to feed this shameful hunger he'd found within himself, something he dared not breathe to anyone, and all the macho-man bluster seemed to work for him until bright, quiet Sammy started saying things like -

"Maybe people think you're overcompensating."

And then -

and then, there was Castiel.

Heavenly, powerful, electrifying, strong, utterly perfect Castiel.

And if Dean had already felt guilty for those secret desires, then he felt ridiculous, for even _entertaining the thought_ that someone like Cas could -

Years passed.

Dean slept with half the continental USA.

Not all women, but they were the only ones he bragged about.

By this point, he was definitely overcompensating.

Mainly for the way the angel made him feel, the way he couldn't escape the image of Castiel's face in profile, the way his hands moved expertly wielding that angel blade -

and he shoved it down further, repressed, ignored.

More years passed. 

He almost got good at it.

Dean Winchester, skilled at: hunting, shooting, beheading monsters, repressing his feelings for Castiel.

Then the bomb of all bombs dropped the night before:

Castiel, Angel of Thursday, Angel of the Lord, Angel of the Winchesters -

Castiel loved him too.

Real love. Epic love. The kind of love that Dean had long discarded as a possibility for himself and even for Sam.

And it was that _too_ he hadn't been allowed to clarify -

it was that _yes, Cas, I feel the same,_ he hadn't had time to say.

He'd been in total shock. 

He wasn't sure if he was glad he hadn't said anything, hadn't even moved, but he had been almost _certain_ he was going to be kissed -

when Cas shoved him on the ground and left a handprint on his arm just like that long-ago handprint he'd received when Cas dragged him out of hell.

Dean hadn't taken the shirt off yet. It was the last contact with anything _Cas_ that he had left.

In the darkness, he tried to go back, tried to picture himself in that bed as a child, because it was something that had once soothed him.

But this time, his eyes snapped open instead.

He realized that he didn't _want_ to go back there, to go back then.

Even with all the hell and high water, the thing was...

Well, the truth of it.

All of that horror and pain, those things brought them together.

All of those years they fought and bled and fought each other and made up and laughed over pizza and beer -

Dean realized, then, he wouldn't trade those memories for anything.

Those memories gave him Castiel.

So he put his hand over the bloody handprint on his shoulder, and Dean Winchester sobbed in his grief and his joy.

Just for _knowing._ Just for _being._

Just in the saying of it:

"Cas, I love you too."

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from "Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Bob Dylan.


End file.
